Melanie Trecek-King goals as a science educator are to teach students the essential skills of science literacy and critical thinking. Helping them understand the process of science and how to draw reasonable conclusions from the available evidence can empower them to make better decisions and protect them from being fooled or harmed.
Yet while educators agree that these skills are important, the stubborn persistence of pseudoscientific and irrational beliefs demonstrates that we have plenty of room for improvement. To help address this problem, she developed a general-education science course (Trecek-King 2022) that, instead of teaching science as a collection of facts to memorize, teaches students how to evaluate the evidence for claims to determine how we know something and recognize the characteristics of good science by evaluating bad science, pseudoscience, and science denial.
